


i should live in salt

by fattyacid



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, M/M, Non-Consensual, Sibling Incest, non-consensual incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 22:15:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14578791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fattyacid/pseuds/fattyacid
Summary: a morning-after. a walk in the woods. the spiral shape of growth and regression, the twisted whorls trauma makes in internal patterns. twins, never actually conjoined. and keyleth is there too!





	i should live in salt

**Author's Note:**

> shows up to critical role 2 years late with incest and ptsd

Vax wakes to a pounding headache and the smell of his sister. He sits bolt upright, awake in an instant, a jolt hitting his spine and spiking straight into his brain like a javelin. _Like an arrow,_ he thinks, darkly, stupidly, groaning as the full-body spasm lets go of his posture and slumping out of bed.

            “Morning,” Percy slurs, sounding half-amused and half-asleep, facedown and not stirring.

            “Ugh,” Vax says, and stumbles from the room.

            He meets Keyleth in three paces, she already dressed, hair loose around her shoulders. A clinging bit of twig on her dress suggests she’s just come in from outdoors, and a breath of fresh air comes with her as she sweeps around the corner.

            “Keyleth.” He could kiss her in relief. He does. He can, so why not do it? She lets him, always surprised but never _that_ surprised, and she squints at him critically when he pulls away.

            “I need a bath or a run through the woods. Come with me?”

            “You smell like Percy,” she says. “Run through the woods. Race you,” she blurts, and in a blur she’s away, an owl down the hall and like a thrown rag ball into, catching against, and through a half-open window, clipping her wing hard against the shutter on the way, barely recovering in awkward frantic flaps as she barrels out, plummets, and catches herself in a dramatic swoop just out of sight before she’s fast disappearing towards the forest to the west. He follows at a sprint, barefoot in only his breeches, leaping half the stairwell and nearly flattening Scanlan in the process. He snags the cloak hanging in the foyer as he charges for the door, ignoring the string of insults that follow him out (typically, oddly stinging in that way only Scanlan can manage) as he wrangles the hood over his head and shrugs it on, barely fastening it as he runs.

            He almost doesn’t do it – there’s almost a ghost of a thought saying _what if you need these later?_ – and then, fuck it, the wings burst out of him, a joyful sound strangled in his throat as the damned cloak impedes his flight. (Keyleth’s, incidentally, not that she even wears it – Vex picked it out for her, it’s a going-into-town cloak, with felted wool in a rich deep green.) He manages to catch air but it’s a labor all the way, holding the cloak away from his throat with one hand, the muscles in his chest and back burning.

            Between their individual struggles to maintain the hectic scramble of an unplanned race with no destination, they straggle to the ground a few meters before the treeline, Keyleth crumpling out of her owl form wheezing and laughing, scrabbling to run like a doe on weak knees. Vax collapses behind her, grateful to touch ground again, cold and hot simultaneously, the sweat on his bare torso chilling in the brisk morning air still blue before dawn. The dew-touched plants are shocking under his bare feet as he watches Keyleth half-jog to the nearest tree, touching it and then trailing around it in a circle, her hand caressing a ring around the thin trunk.

            “I win,” she pants, flushed and out of breath. In the gathering light, she is especially luminous. An orange flower among the greens and blues and grays. His eye won’t leave her.

            Vax’s face is getting to used to these smiles, now. It doesn't even ache. It hasn’t in a while. Why is it so easeful, just to be alone with her? “You win,” he says, and his love makes it into his voice. Her smile turns a little bashful, pleased, like a kid’s.

            “Why’d you wanna get out of there so fast?” she asks. “Were you racing me, or were you running away?”

            “Both,” he says. “I was running to you.”

            “And away fromm?” she prompts, raising an eyebrow and leaning into the tree.

            “Percy.”

            “Are you guys fighting?”

            “No.”

            She raises her other eyebrow.

            “ _No_ , we are not fighting. I was running from Percy’s _bed_ , which is also my sister’s bed. Which I woke up in.”

            “Oh,” she says, dropping whatever she thought she’d found and looking puzzled. “Ew?”

            “Mm,” he says.

            “’Mm’ as in ‘sure okay let’s not talk about it’ or ‘Mm’ as in ‘ _mmm_ ,’ as in _not_ ew-”

            “Ew,” Vax counters. “No, that was ‘mm let’s not talk about it.’”

            “Mm,” she says.

            They laugh at the same time.

            He draws closer to her, slowly, and for a few paces she keeps his gaze. He’s just crossing into the deep well of shadow that brims around the treeline when she takes a step in deeper, matching his pace – she draws them, he pushes her, and the game picks up between them again, her feet sure on every backwards-toed branch, his step quiet as the grave he walks farther from all the time, following her, the canopy closing a secret world around them.

            It’s fresh and lush and cold amongst the close-grown pines. The undergrowth comes and goes as the trees grow denser in patches, then thin out again, ferns and brush and moss lapsing to drier, needle-carpeted ground; here it’s still evening-dark as the sky begins, somewhere, to brighten. Keyleth is a floating flame. A will-o-wisp. Breath after breath of the cool and the peace. At last the fever and the chill of the flight abate and walking is comfortable. Keyleth’s cloak on him is a grounding warmth as his bare feet slowly numb.

            Wordlessly, they walk on, till at last she grows bored or drawn in and she slows, her eyes crinkled at the corners, lets him approach her. It’s magic every time, somehow. That never goes away.

            “Love you,” he greets her. She smiles into his kiss.

            “Better?” she asks, her arms come round his neck, her forehead on his.

            “Almost,” he says, and he tackles her to the ground.           

            They roll over and over each other, twisting and snagging in the wet underbrush and quickly attracting cold, mud, twigs, insects probably, bruises perhaps slightly, later on, if they think to search for them. He lets Keyleth land on top of him before they roll too far, and she settles the same time he does, her elbows caging his head, her hair full of leaves and bits falling over his face. She smells sweet and earthy and bitter in equal measure – she smells of loam and wet bark and hearth-fire and molasses.

            She smells of –

            A pang comes to him as he names it, the warm breath of her as she settles on him turning into – the burnt-sugar smell of beets cooking in the embers of a campfire, Vex’ahalia young and pale and soot-smudged, her lovely high cheekbones too prominent, the bitter arguments they’d have around miserable campfires in the cold wet night, burning what scraps they’d scavenged and stolen and then eating them anyway, inexperienced at everything they needed most to survive – cooking, stealing, sleeping outdoors; lying to each other. Vex’ahalia pushing burned beets on him insisting she wasn’t hungry. Going to bed angry with each other, having cajoled and joked circles and eventually shouted at each other, both trying to make the other take seconds of the barely-food that was all they had to eat that night.

            He’d lay awake late into the night, cold and hot, furious. At her and for her and at himself and at the world. How dare they, he, any of it, Vex’ahalia his sister and the only good person, the only _person_ , sleeping cold and hungry, and him unable to do anything for it? How dare he fight with her? How dare she let him? How could any of this stupid world be possible, and what the hell could he do? Stupid, circular thoughts, till he sat up stiff and freezing and moved over to her in the dark.

            She’d stay asleep – he could always tell when she was faking, how peaceful her dreams, whether she needed a blanket or relief of one – that precious fine face, and the furrow in her brow! How stupid to yell at her – childish – and more, more, intensely then, that sorrowful deep ache of loving her, loving her too dearly, wanting for her everything, the whole world – the world as it should be, _fair, fair if only to Vex’ahalia –_

            He’d put his blanket over her, tiptoeing off to the forest to scrounge again for wood and returning wet and tired and sad and furtive, his anger snagged on a branch somewhere in the rainy night.

            He’d take greater risks with the jobs he’d find in town.

            (He took the brand of the Clasp.)

            Things he’d seek, and find, in the towns they passed through or skirted around – or even, sometimes, towns they’d avoided. Times they’d stayed off the road, and he’d sought and found it anyway in by-the-trail encampments, caravans of working men who hardly had coin to make it worth his while. Times he could have gotten his coin some other way, and he took risks he didn’t need to because . Because that was his way, wasn’t it.

            How he’d be damned, damned, before Vex’ahalia lived on stolen roots cooked in ashes while he had flesh and blood – damned, damned, damned.

            Keyleth’s eyes are warm and bright and patient above him. He looks at her, finally, breathes in again deeper. Not burned beets, but not unlike them – woodsmoke and damp earth and a sweetness. Honey maybe.

            “Where did you go this morning?” he asks her, thinking maybe the bakery…

            “I could ask you the same thing,” she says. “Got a lot on your mind?”

            “Mm. Remembering.”

            “Remembering what?”

            “You first.”

            She looks at him. Surprised?

            “This morning. Where you went.”

            “Oh,” she says. “Yeah. When you all went off upstairs Scanlan and I kept drinking. We found some of that solstice brew from Winter’s Crest. I woke up in the garden.”

            Liqueur with dried fruits in – or a patch of beets after all. Both? He presses his face into the crook of her neck and breathes in – Keyleth, a little sweat-sour, and now he can smell the hangover on her beneath the cling of fresh dirt – so perhaps the scent he caught was an aura, an omen, a make-believe.

            Keyleth lets him smell her and then lay his head back in the dirt without protest. “Now _you_ go,” she says. “Copper for your thoughts?”

            He smiles – at her, her phrasing – and then feels it fade as he tries to sort out an answer. “Vex’ahalia,” he says, eventually, no explanation but the whole of it.

            She says nothing for a while, biting her lip. He’s come out of his thoughts enough now to watch her go into hers, her eyes following some line on his face without catching his gaze. “Are things,” she says carefully, when she speaks again. “Are you guys okay?”

            “Vex and I?” he asks, as if she could mean anyone else. “Yes. I think so? What do you mean?”

            “I mean you ran out of the bedroom like it was on fire this morning,” she says. “You’re still in the bedroom in your brain, though.”

            “I’m not in – I’m with Vex’ahalia in my brain,” he corrects, though it’s not correct that way either. “I’m thinking of Vex’ahalia. I’m _always_ thinking of Vex’ahalia.”

            “You are _not_ _always_ thinking of Vex. You are currently thinking something, or working on something, or confused by something _to do with_ Vex. Is it sharing Percy?” she asks. When he doesn’t answer, she continues, “Is it sharing me?”

            “It’s both,” he says. Though he dare not tread here. Though he can’t stop thinking of it. Though there are no words, no coherent thoughts, no clear path through what his twisted heart is always always doing, especially and always about Vex’ahalia.

            Only. And. Keyleth, the subtle dynamic radiance of her in the changing early morning gloom, as blue predawn is giving way to the undramatic pastels of a cloudless sunrise, in the peeks between the canopy behind the twiggy silhouette of her tangled mane. Only. His true love, looking down on him patient and ready and asking and giving and easy, easy as breathing, to breathe beneath in safety. Only. This safety and intimacy can be fouled, surely first of all by a shadowed heart like his. Only. This safety and intimacy are built on the web of secrets and trusts and catching-eachothers, and he can only strengthen that bond by relying on it. By falling on it. By finding words. By leaning on her. By leaning on her. By finding a way.

            “Both?” she says, when he’s stared at her long enough, and the light is slipping in brighter behind her.

            “I’m sorry,” he starts, and she rolls off to the side of him. She tucks her left arm in, reaches around him with the right; wiggles the left underneath his head as she pulls him in. The fall of pine needles they disturb disgorges a centipede, and it crawls under Vax’s leg and away somewhere. Keyleth snuggles against him, hiding his face by her breast, pulling the cloak over them both. “It’s going to be complicated and it won’t make a lot of sense. I can’t make sense of it. But.”

            “I love you,” she says, and kisses his head, ready to listen, ready to shield him from what he’s about to say – not even knowing, only for learning, as they’ve taught each other, talking through fears and shortcomings and shame and dread and sadness. Her chin rests on the crown of his head.

            “I love you,” he says, feeling small but – held, and held by her, and he will trust her, he will honor her by this, even if he shames them both by this – he will, he can, he forces himself to breathe one deep breath before a panicked flutter starts up in him. “I love you.”

            “Vex’ahalia,” she says, and then she’s silent.

            “Vex’ahalia,” he says. And since when has her name burned on his tongue - ? If he could just see the beginning, maybe – “When we were children,” he tries, “We used to bathe together.”

            His blood runs cold. No, no, no. But that sounds like – but it’s not wrong, isn’t it? He should explain – he can’t explain. He lets it lie. _Let her think the worst. Let her imagine where this is going. Let her loathe me for it._

When he looks up, she kisses him, bending her head down far enough to just catch the bridge of his nose. She tucks him back in again and presses her palm flat between his shoulder blades.

            He tries again.

            “When we were young we shared everything. Everything. It was from my sister that I learned – we were fascinated,” he babbles, letting his runaway thoughts take over his tied-up tongue. “All the ways we were the same and just a few differences. She has this mole on her calf, I’ll bet you’ve never even seen it – I haven’t got one on mine. On either leg. We called it her lucky freckle. We were ticklish in the same places but I’d always cry mercy first. We were the same, but – there – you know – and it never used to scare us, we were just little kids, and we shared everything – but – we’d touch each other,” he says. “We would – it was kid stuff but – but we knew we weren’t allowed. It wasn’t serious but it was still a secret and – and it never bothered her. It never got to her. I could see it didn’t. Do you understand me?” he croaks, desperate, and Keyleth squeezes him.

            “Not yet. But I’m listening. I think I understand so far. Keep going.”

            “She’s not like me,” Vax says. “It’s all – I’ve muddled it. We were kids and we touched each other’s bits, like kids will do. Whatever. It needn’t have mattered, only – well, we grew up. We kept growing up, and she – changed. I changed too, but not like her – she – she grew _breasts_.” Breathless, now, he tries to steady himself. It all sounds so stupid out loud. Somehow not as condemning, even, as he was expecting – he was scared of his twin going through puberty. So what. So what? “She grew beautiful. She – became a creature unlike me, where before we’d been so the same, and it – electrified me.” No, no, no – ‘electrified’ – only how apt, and he lets it lie for the twist it puts in his gut. _Let her hear the worst. Let her hear the worst_. “I couldn’t stop looking at her. I had dreams…” _Let her hear it speak them speak –_ only he can’t, now, here. Birds are coming awake above them. Keyleth lets him panic against her chest, his breath coming fast and dry, as he struggles for words around the feeling squeezing down on his throat. ‘I had dreams.’ He did have dreams. _Let her hear the worst. Let it lie. Let her imagine what dreams you had. Of your sister. Of your sister._

            “I always hated – ” He chokes. Burned beets. The scar under the scar on his shoulder. Back alleys behind seedy taverns in towns they never returned to. Vex’ahalia, her skin like milk, her hands gripping him hard, her mouth – _“I always hated her gorgeous fucking tits_ ,” he spits out, before unbidden – summoned – immortal – burning – that night –

            “I always hated your gorgeous fucking tits,” he says, broken, and she seizes his hands before he can draw away, and she is strong and he is weak, forever, forever, since the very beginning. She takes his hands and she draws them to her chest and he whimpers, a shudder going through him as he fails even to try to pull back. Her breasts impossibly soft and her nipples still softer, the sensation burning through him, profane, incandescent, he feels his sister’s tits with every nerve in his body, and his knees try to buckle under him.

            “Please,” he’s saying. “Please, please, please, Vex’ahalia, please, please—”

            “Vax,” she’s saying over him, clearer, harder, urgent, her hands over his, her eyes never leaving his, “Listen to me. Listen to me.”

            “Can’t,” he says, “Can’t, I can’t, please, please, I can’t-”

            “You are _mine_ ,” she says, and she steps to him, still holding his hands on her, and the sensation has dulled as her face swims nearer his in the darkness, upturned and fierce, infinitely, everything, the only thing in the universe – “You are _mine_ , brother-”

            “You don’t want this,” he shrills, barely a voice, barely standing as she clutches him, draws him in, her grasp like vines-

            “You are mine,” she says, as she holds him, and he can’t shrink from her because she is in him like a thorn, and he would never – he doesn’t want to, he wants – he wants –

            He does it, he damns them, he damns her, he filthies them both with his lips, the soft skin of her neck just beneath her ear, and he hears the hitched-in breath she draws when he kisses her there.

            “Do you see?” he says, shattered, triumphant, pulling back from her, and the pain in her eyes is worth – nothing, nothing will ever be worth that look in her eyes, the pity and anger and sorrow and fire –

            She surges up to kiss him, hard, her teeth on his lip and he lets her, limp to it, lets her kiss him and tug on him and try to pull him back into her. She draws away after a moment, when he doesn’t, can’t react, and she stares him in the face.

            “Vax,” she says.

            He looks at her, all the fight gone out of him. What now? What now, for them? What now between them?

            “Vax,” says Keyleth.

            He’s shaking against her, his jaw clenched. The sky is light.

            “I,” he says. “She.”

            “It’s okay if you can’t talk about it,” she says, into the crown of his head. “Vax. Did something happen between you two?”

            “Things have always happened between us. Things have always been. It’s not like this always,” he says, interrupting himself. “It’s almost never like this but when I get a pang of it it’s impossible to feel anything else and when I look at it – I’ve just not been looking at it,” he mumbles. “Hoping it goes away. It does. It dies down. Sometimes for months and months, never surfacing, until-”

            “Did something happen today?”

            “It was that – ball,” he spits. “That stupid fucking ball we had. It ruined. Everything.”

            “You hated that ball,” she recalls, not exactly right and not sounding sure of it, either, because truthfully-

            “I loved that ball. It was wonderful. I’d dreamed – we’d both been dreaming since we were kids, that kind of fanciness and ease. She looked lovely, didn’t she?”

            Keyleth says nothing, but after a moment she nods.

            “She looked so lovely.” There’s a way to tell her this, he knows, he’s catching the edges of it and if he can just say it right, maybe she’ll understand – something of it, and he won’t have to carry it in secret anymore. He can’t stop now, anyway. He has to go through. “It suits her, don’t you think? Playing royalty. My sister, Mistress of the Gray Hunt. _Lady_ Vex’ahalia. As it should be. As it should always have been.”

            “She does wear it well.”

            “I thought we’d dance the whole night away – it was like a scene from a daydream. My beautiful sister – that dress – ” He falters. That dress. Vex’ahalia in that dress. A vision. And they all saw it, that was the magic of it all – everyone else saw her as he did, as she’d always been: raven hair falling down her back, her pointed chin, her shapely arms, the smile that never left her face, now coy, now confiding; she was the finest of them, and she looked it, and she took it as her due that they all saw it, too. And she could tell, that night, as she always could, from the ardor in her admirers’ faces how they were feeling, and – and just as he could always tell what dream she was having from how she looked asleep, she could always tell the beat of his heart from – from what? What clued her? His eyes on her, in that dress. His eyes on the floor as she peeled out of it. What could he do? What could he have done?

            “We went off on our own,” he says, trying to keep talking, trying not to get lost back there again. “We’d danced and drank till we were sore and the night was winding down. She was complaining of the tightness of her corset, and I was wearing that awful jacket Percy got me-”

            “I _love_ that jacket,” Keyleth protests, as if she can’t help herself. “I know you said it’s too tight in the shoulders-”

            “Cuts your whole upper body to uselessness,” he says, decisively, comfortable, a conversation about a stupid garment they’ve had already. “If you can’t move in the shoulders you’re stiff all the way down. It was tight in the elbows, too. Couldn’t wait to get it off me.”

            And he had – they’d – leaning on each other, reminiscing over one another in aborted whispers and shouts of smothered laughter, and Vax had felt as if the sun shone from the center of his chest and from his sister’s, too, they had everything – it had all been for this, hadn’t it? Them rich and fed and settled, cavorting drunk in a castle with her husband’s name on it. Lady, Lady, Lady! He couldn’t stop calling her by that well-deserved title, squeezing her hands and all, all light, it had been so easy-

            “Help me with the laces,” she groaned, listing left and then right in her seat, leaning her whole body loose and reckless into the gripe, and Vax stood behind her just waiting, letting her play it out. “Come onnn,” she’d drawled, “I’m _dyinnng_.”

            “Posture, then, _posture,_ Vex’ahalia,” he’d quipped, tight and posh and still a passable impression of Erion, who’d had a pinched face and amber eyes and _tried to the best of himself_ to tutor them in manners, ways, and charm befitting themselves, and besides his stupid nose he’d really made them balance books on their heads, thought it was _funny_ , only they hadn’t seen he was laughing at the little half-breed mongrels in his care till after. Vax red-faced with humiliated tears watching his sister, who was even fiercer and more tempestuous at nine years old, struggling to hold her spine loose-but-strong as she stood trembling with anger at herself and anger at _fucking Erion_ , at _being a half-blooded bastard_ , god how they’d grown to know of what they were to everyone, everyone else, it floods back, and it’s he and Vex’ahalia, together against the world – only now they’re here-

            Here, here, and her eyes meet his in the mirror – she laughs a raw, reckless laugh and she joins him, “Pleased we are to entreat,” she says, round with a plumb in her mouth, a stone, a cherry – a nonsense phrase from back in those days, the two of them hiding in the branches of a tree and licking each other’s wounds, practicing sneering down on the pricks who sneered down at them.

            “Be pleased,” he says, yanking on the laces of her corset, and she brightens up, and she pulls him with her, squirming gratefully as he unfastens her deft and quick even dead drunk. When it’s opened loose enough for her to wiggle the fastenings together-apart and free herself, Vex shimmies out of it all at once, down to just petticoat and stockings, and she tosses it all in one heap onto the bed.

            He steps back and she stands, and he looks over her shoulder to the vanity again, seeking something better for his gaze to hold – there in the mirror, her bare back and his own face over her shoulder.

            Guilty. He looks guilty.

            He looks away again, returning to her face – she hasn’t noticed, yet, and it’ll go away if he just –

            “ _Careful_ ,” he laughs, as she yanks on the coat, first at the lapels and then down at his wrists, and he tries to wriggle free but she’s trapped him worse, and now with his arms in the too-tight sleeves of the too-fine jacket he’s stuck. He laughs. He laughs the feeling out of him. He laughs. “Quit it, you’re making it worse-”

            “Hold _still_ ,” she says, yanking on the sleeves again, and her bare tits bounce with the movement, and he _does not notice, he does not see._ “You just-”

            “I can get out of it myself,” he protests, breaking back from her and nearly ripping the stupid sleeves off the stupid coat in his haste to get away.

            She gives him one of her _I-know-better_ faces, and says, “You’re going to look like an arse with just the sleeves stuck on you.”

            “Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be worn,” he snarls, finally struggling out of the damn thing and flinging it across the room where it hits the wall and falls behind the bed. “There. Where it belongs.”

            “Percy went through such _trouble_ for that, you know,” she says, pouting her lower lip at him and turning at the shoulder, croquetting to make him squirm further. “You did look so darling in it-”

            Vax hardly has to protest as she’s already snickering, too drunk to pretend she liked it any more than he did. “Darling as a little prince,” he says anyway.

            “Oh, don’t let him know you hated it, all right? He really did his best guessing your measurements, and he wasn’t so far off-”

            “Only you could have _helped_ him, you know-”

            “I’ll have you know I _did_ help, and it’s not that _I_ meant it to fit you that way, only your arms are so thick now-” She grabs at his biceps, he wrestles her off. They argue about the coat for a time. It’s almost safe. It’s almost enough. She’s restless and floppy with drink and relief of her own confining garments, and she moves like she’s alone, unobserved, forgetting even their exaggerated pretend-play of squeamish-to-see taunting-to-show when one of them’s naked, now: a play Vax tries to invoke as she perches at the nightstand, talking meaningless talk at him about the meaningless discarded coat he’s never ever going to touch again.

            “Put a shawl on you, at least,” he says, moving to do it for her; she swats him away, irritable, her hands busy trying to take down her hair.

            “Stop being a baby,” she snaps, “and help me get these fucking pins out so I can sleep.”

            “Put your tits away and I’ll help.”

            “Don’t look at them then. Look at my hair,” she commands.

            He should have gone to get her husband. He should have put a blanket around her shoulders. He should have just left, forgotten it all, drank past oblivion and passed out somewhere in the cold.

            He tries to tell Keyleth. He tries to use the words Vex’ahalia used, what he remembers of the tears and fire poured out between them.

            “We were always together. We were – we were once one body.” It doesn’t make sense, here, in this patch of forest in the early morning, with Keyleth warm and patient and close and far from him, from him in that moment, from the him that is and isn’t Vex’ahalia so painfully. “We were once one body and now we’re two. It didn’t make sense, she said, that we should be afraid of each other – that I should be afraid of her. She didn’t feel it. Do you see? She never felt it. But she did it anyway, out of love for me–”

            “What did she do, Vax,” Keyleth says, and her voice isn’t quiet and light like it was. It’s deep and hard and commanding, suddenly. It’s urgent. Almost scared.

            “I – I wouldn't’ve otherwise,” he stammers, “She – I was never ever going to-”

            “Vax. What did she do.”

            “She made me,” he whispers. “She made me.”

            And that’s not true, either, that’s not right – and it’s not coming out the way it should – his sister’s tears falling on his face as she kissed him, tenderloving scared and hot and wrong, his breath heaving shallow as she tried to comfort him, tried to kiss him down, tried to convince him there was nothing to fear –

            Vex’ahalia, the smell of her, hot fast breath and sweat and tears between them so her neck and chest were almost wet, his forehead pressed in her collarbone. Hard and soft. “Forget about it, let’s forget about this, I never meant to push so hard, Vax-”

            “I didn’t,” he sobs, “I didn’t want you to _see_ -”

            “I always saw you,” she says, and he cries harder, “I always saw you, brother, you can hide from anyone else but never from me-”

            “What else did you see?” His voice breaking, hysterical – “What have you seen of me?”

            “Not enough,” and the sob has caught her voice up, too, and that chokes his air off completely – “I want all of you, all of you, I can’t stand not having you with me, _hiding_ -”

            “I’m yours,” he gasps, fighting back the pressure in his head and eyes and throat, fighting it all back down. “I’m yours. You’ll have me.”

            And he’d kissed her, and she’d kissed him, again again, till they’d both stopped crying and they’d smeared the tears into each other’s cheeks, till they were both hiccup-laughing, sympathy too acute to bear.

            “I don’t want this to be pain for you,” she’d said, kissing his forehead and smoothing his hair. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

            “I don’t want,” he’d said, and couldn’t finish. Couldn’t figure it out. Let her guide his hand to her breast instead, and there it was, only flesh, only skin, only his sister hoarse and exhausted with worry for him, and them just stupid urchins burning stolen beets still, lying to each other that they were fine.

            “I don’t want you to see what I am,” he’d said, wretched, and she’d laughed a laugh with no happiness in it.

            “I will never fear what you are. I’ll never fear you. I am you. You are mine.” She takes his face in her hands and looks at him, hard. “I will _never_ fear you.”

            He. He just lets her. He tries to feel the cleansing fire in his soul. He tries to let her burn the shame from him. She looks until her gaze falters across his face, finding no relief there, and then she wraps him tight against her chest again and he lets himself be held, numb to it, slack. That draws her away, and they play-pretend lamely after that, as she rolls over to pull a blanket around herself and he kisses her goodnight, on the lips so she knows he’s not scared, that he’s cured, that it’s all right between them now, and she doesn’t notice that he’s hard even as he walks out, even after all of it, even through the tears and terror, and he falls asleep with it, even dead drunk, heart pounding, the bed he shares with Keyleth cold all around him.

            “I tried – I tried to tell her then,” he says. He’s rambling. Keyleth’s finally looking at him like he’s fucking crazy. “That I didn’t want her to know, to see it, but she did anyway and she still loves me and she asked her husband to fuck me, I’m sure she did, I know they talked of it before that first night Percy and I ever – I know they must’ve talked about it because he did it like it’d been resolved long ago, and I know he’d never have even _approached_ it if they hadn’t talked and talked it first. What’s she like when she’s alone with you? How much of her is shared with me? What’s hers and what’s mine and what’s the difference, when I can’t wash her touch from me? What kind of _brother_ wants – what kind of man am I?”

            Keyleth looks at him. It’s hard to tell, now, what she’s thinking. He can hardly see her face through the snowflurry of his own thoughts, memory hazing the edges of everything. The sky is blue up there, somewhere. Light shafts are beginning to fall between the trees.

            “I don’t know,” she says. “I think – I think you and Vex are really complicated people in your own right.” Careful. Unsure. “I think what’s between you is even more complicated. But Vax…”

            “Go on,” he says. “Go on. Say it.” _What must you think of me now._

            “It sounds like – she hurt you.” Her eyes – he meets them then. She looks tense, tentative, like she can’t trust him to hear what she has to say. Like – like loyalty’s blinded him to some evil that’s _Vex’ahalia’s_.

            “You aren’t listening,” he grits out, frustrated. “It wasn’t her fault – none of it’s her fault. I– ”

            “Okay,” she interrupts. “Okay – but – it hurt you, didn’t it? Whatever happened. That night after the ball. It hurt you.”

            He tries. He breathes a few breaths of the still forest air and tries not to feel the fever heat that’s threatening to boil his brain. “Yes,” he says. If she’s patient with him he’ll be patient with her. After all she’s listened to him, in this, she’s here –

            “Even if it’s – your – even if you’re angry with yourself for loving – wrong,” she falters. “Even if – you want the wrong things and you hate what you want.”

            He ducks his head against her. It’s shifted. The panic’s dying down. She heard him, she’s here with him, he forced it out and now it’s whatever she thinks. He can smell the pine needles again, the cool wash of forest floor and still-brightening daylight coming up to him in waves.

            She doesn’t say anything for a while, waiting on him. He realizes he hasn’t told her anything, hasn’t made it clear, but he’s done enough now. For now.

            “Is this,” she says finally. “Is this like Silas Briarwood?”

            He’s laughing already before the name’s fully off her lips. He squeezes her around the waist. “No, this is not like Silas Briarwood.”

            “Okay.”

            Well. “It’s not _unlike_ Silas Briarwood,” he muses. “I suppose. In that I hate myself for it and I ruin every good thing and my twisted fucking-”

            “Quit it,” she interrupts, and pinches him. “Quit. I’ll get Percy. We’ll punish you.”

            “Hmm,” he says, and pulls a little away. “Please don’t though. I’m not-”

            “Joking,” she says. “I know it’s not – thank you for telling me. I know it’s different. I know it’s complicated. I think – there’s a lot I won’t be able to understand. I think it’s best if I just – I love you. Do you know that?”

            “I know that,” he says, though he feels he deserves it less than ever, now; and yet. “I love you too,” he says.

            “That ball was a long time ago,” she says, careful again, prompting, trying to tease something out.

            “It was.” It was and it wasn’t. It is right now, sometimes. It eclipses everything. But then some memories do that – rise up to choke you when your guard is down. Change you. Twist you. But then again. Keyleth is right. That ball was a long time ago, now. Almost a different lifetime.

            “Are things,” she says. “How are things between you now?”

            He laughs. “We don’t talk of it. We haven’t. We won’t. I begged her to promise me. It’s gone. We got close to it. To something. And now…” Now, it’s nothing, they’ve evened out, they play pretend. And in truth he could live and die without ever seeing his sister naked again and be just fine. So long as he doesn’t – what? Get too close to her while drunk again? Catch the scent of her in her husband’s bed, which he avoids anyway except when, sometimes sometimes, Percy calls him there and he cannot resist –? Think too hard about the precious, awful past they share? It’s all right, except when it isn’t – it’s all right almost all the time. It’s wonderful, even – only he can’t predict it – just days ago he chanced to see Keyleth kissing her and it was the best feeling, to know down to his marrow that the bright sweet softness of Keyleth’s kiss was something Vex’ahalia could share, could have for herself in a way he’d never – because who was she to Keyleth, after all, how differently they – how long ago, that night, that ball, that awful night he can’t –

            “Maybe you should.”

            “…What?”

            “Maybe you should talk about it, Vax.” Keyleth’s pulled back to look at him. “Maybe you have to.”

            He sits up. He’s dizzy, but he’ll come back to himself. He breathes. It’s warming up already, the forest sounds coming into his ears. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he hears himself say.

            “I don’t think it’s healthy,” Keyleth says. She sits up too.

            “Of course it isn’t _healthy_ -”

            “I know it feels horrible,” she says. “I bet Vex feels horrible, too.”

            That. Well he knows, of course, he can imagine – how she must feel, how _he’d_ feel, if he –

            “I don’t want to,” his voice says, hollowly. “I don’t think I can.” Nonsense words. Can’t he? Can’t they? If she can bear it, why couldn’t he? If she could confront him, why can’t he-

            “It doesn’t have to be soon. I – it doesn’t have to be ever,” Keyleth says. She looks down at her lap. He looks over at her. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to just leave it alone, whatever it is. What you guys have…” She glances over, but not at his face. Just at his posture, trying to gauge or decide – “It’s different. It’s different from anything.”

            Just as Vex said, too – they’re different from everyone. Why should they be like anyone else? Why was what they had anything like any other siblings in the world, _brother_ , _when were we ever like anyone else?_

“You know what’s best between you two,” she says. “But I’m just saying – maybe try it. Talking about it. Maybe – ”

            “Maybe we have to,” he says.

            “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says.

            He meets her eyes. She gives him all the patient focus she does in moments like this, when his heart’s weary and stupid and knotted up and she is with him for that, too, for the worst of himself. She steadies him.

            “What would it take?” she asks. “What do you think you need?”

            He pictures his sister young and whole. Unscarred. Her heart untested. Clever. Cleverer than him. Brighter than anyone, even mother, even back then. What would it take for them to be themselves again, bratty and precocious and carefree, king and queen of their world of two?

            “I don’t know,” he says.

            While they walk back the forest is filled with the cacophony of morning. Birds and beasts of every kind cry in the new day. Vax can be quiet, but the forest is never so full and freely wild as when he walks it with Keyleth; it’s as if they salute her, too, as joyously as the coming day, and each thing calls out to announce itself. It is morning, and the clouds are moving slowly across the sky.


End file.
